Communicate Jesus in Material Design

October 15, 2015October 15, 2015 ampers Leave a comment

Communicate Jesus is my least popular app on the Google Play store. This is probably because you can just visit the website without the need to have an app at all. As this is really a testing app for me, I went ahead and looked into the new Android Material Design, and if I screwed it up, it would only affect 14 people who currently have the app installed on their device.

Anyway, I have now updated this app to use Material Design and it should even be backwards compatible to Android 2.2 (Froyo). I have no idea what it actually looks like on devices running that, but it compiled and didn’t throw up any errors. I think the app looks much much better.

I have updated the APK and screenshots on both the portfolio page and the Google Play store if you want to check this new version out.

Since I have now worked out how to make things in Material Design, hopefully other apps I have made will make the move soon….

Canberra Christian Conventions new site

October 9, 2015October 9, 2015 ampers 2 Comments

As hinted in my last post, I have now added to my website portfolio page one more site.

I have been helping out with Canberra Christian Conventions for maybe two years now. I sit on the Requip team and do things for their website. A while ago they bought the theme The7 and I helped roll that out to their conference arms (Mens, Womens and Requip) to better advertise their events. The main site however was getting more and more long in the tooth. Anyway, after some work, last night we made the main site go live.

While The7 is a robust WordPress theme, it still didn’t do what we wanted it to do for our homepage, so I coded it myself. The homepage has three distinct layouts for different size screens, and if the conferences have more than one image they want to display (sometimes Requip has 2 or 3 conferences on the go at the same time), the page will randomly pick one to display on the homepage (at the moment they all have one image).

I also tried to mimic the top nav bar for desktop and mobile. Personally I don’t like the mobile navigation, but since that is what the theme does, I tried, as much as I could, without relying onany extra javascript libraries to pull it off. And it kinda works alright.

I have heard that on iPhones the page “sticks” to the top. I am yet to get my hands on an iPhone to test and see what it does. If you have any other comments about the site and how it performs in different browsers, please let me know.

Websites

October 1, 2015 ampers Leave a comment

I have updated the theme for this site. I was getting a bit bored of it and I think this one looks simpler and might be quicker to navigate.

The new theme is a free one called TA Portfolio. I have made a few adjustments, such as colour, image sizes, hiding titles to fields I leave blank and threw in a timeline, just because I could.

Now that the theme has been improved, I think I should also go back and improve the wording and images on the portfolio pages. But all in good time.

I have also added a website portfolio item to showcase some other sites I have made. There is another web site I will add to that portfolio page, but I am going to wait till the new update is live (stay tuned).